Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday March 25, 2016 @05:15PM
from the close-but-no-cigar dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A demolition company has leveled the wrong housing duplex after one of its employees was misled by a Google Maps error. Instead of bringing down a house destroyed by a tornado in Rowlett, Texas at 7601 Cousteau Drive, the wrecking crew demolished another home at 7601 and 7603 Calypso Drive, a block away. Owners of the second house were waiting for their house to be repaired, since it didn't suffer major damages in the tornado. The demolition company's CEO dismissed the incident as "not a big deal." The wrecking crew used Google Maps to find the house to demolish because they were brought in from a neighboring town, but failed to double-check with a neighbor before starting their work. A Google engineer confirmed that Google Maps was showing the wrong information.

"All information contained with Google Maps is provided for Entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon for complete accuracy, up to and including: GPS guidance for self-guided weapons systems, Pizza Delivery, and House Demolition."

I never rely on street numbers in maps apps. It may have improved since I cared (circa 2006), but in my experience it's at best interpolated data from a variety of sources that may not be 100% accurate.

In one neighborhood where I grew up, Google street maps has the house numbers increasing southward when they should be increasing northward. It's the only block of the street, the numbering starts with 1, and it's pretty long, with at least 20 half-acre lots along both sides. I'm going to guess that the other parallel streets in the neighborhood are similarly misnumbered.

In my city (Resistencia, Argentina) google has *ALL* of the house numbers wrong. "Even numbers on the right hand, odd numbers on the left" is the standard. But google, for some reason, has the opposite. So, Google Street View shows my business as the house across the street.

I think I'm this instance both houses were badly storm damaged so they probably just saw something that looked like it was condemned and got on with it. It might actually save the "victim" money if they get a free demolition and can skip straight to rebuilding.

The article said the house was waiting for repairs. It's very possible it had a building permit that looked like a demo permit and the workers didn't bother reading it.

When you are destroying a house, you should read the thing.

As it is, best case is they get sued for negligence and their insurance company will pay a few hundred thousand bucks to the homeowner's insurance company. Google will also probably take a hard look at their google maps TOS and make sure that there's are an ironclad consequential damages waiver and a solid indemnity provision in there.

It's interesting that you point that out. I went and looked and there's a Google Maps for business/work. I'd think there's a serviceability/merchantability obligation there - irrespective of any attempt to attempt to will it away UNLESS they already specifically included some such. So, unless they have a clause in there specifically granting them immunity then a jury might find them partially culpable and there's a damned good chance that they *will* be named in the lawsuit. And there will be a lawsuit.;-)

Seems like you should be using official zoning maps from the city for something like this...

Hell no! Nobody else was looking at the zoning maps. The number on the street, mailbox, etc., is more likely the source of info they used to start with. Grabbing a city map, which was updated to show news housing numbers, possibly years before the post office and homeowners have updated their own information, is a more likely recipe for disaster than what happened here.

Nope. Using those government maps won't get you off the hook. Typically, you need a survey by a licensed surveyor submitted and approved by the building dept. Even then, I know of a guy who couldnt move into his condo because it turned out half of his apartment was built on the next door neighbors property.

My experience is data quality is always a challenge. Even commercial sources can have errors (free or volunteer sources more so), so I believe that a basic audit is always important before proceeding with any critical work.

That won't work, either. NY city won a case against a developer who relied on their zoning map to start construction on a building several stories high. Even though they had a permit, and the zoning map said it could be that high, someone noticed that the steel skeleton was getting higher than allowed by the actual zoning ordinance (as opposed to the map) so the city made them dismantle a story or two.

How hard would it be to go to the nearest intersection and make sure you're on the right street, and double check the street address?

According to Google maps, Cousteau turns into Calypso, and street view verifies this. The streets form a loop, and there is only one set of signs in that area, in a non-intersection corner where one street name arbitrarily turns into the other. Due to the tornado, this sign pole may not even currently exist. I can completely see where the confusion lies with this situation. While the demo crew are at fault for lack of due diligence, who's the fucking imbecile at the city planning office that approved the same exact street number for two houses within spitting distance of each other on what is essentially the same street?

Close to where I live, there's a street which starts in one town and runs into another town. Street name does not change at the town border. #1 is neighbours with... #1. Those people get each other's mail and visitors all the time. Nobody saw that one coming.

There's brain dead mouth breathers working in the planning department of every city. I remember going to a party of a hot girl I met at uni once. She told me she lived in 65 somethingorother street. Anyway I got to the street and drove all the way to the end and it only went up to 40. I was pretty pissed to get blown off like that.

Turns out after a few minutes of swearing at the situation that the street continued with the same name and continuous numbering one block further down. Two different streets in t

It should be a requirement for any developer, house builder, or city planning department to be a delivery person for at least 6 months. You will see the end of stupid addressing and small, hard to make out numbers REAL quick.

This rant brought to you by someone who has also been mistaken as Mr. Amazon.com man this past winter.

There's brain dead mouth breathers working in the planning department of every city.... Two different streets in the same suburb with the same name.

I work in the San Fernando Valley, which is in the northern reaches of Los Angeles city. We've got some streets here that are broken into 30 different parts, and all have the same name because they run roughly in a line. Check out Lurline Ave, Superior St, or Mayall St for shits and giggles.

Most every numbered street (mostly Avenues, it seems) in Phoenix has a corresponding way, place, and circle. Add in the complimentary North for South, East for West, and it's logical but sometimes a bit confusing.

The house we ended up buying in Wyndmoor, PA was on a street like that. Took us half an hour to find it the first time because not only were there two discontinuities, but at one point the street turned and intersected with the main street. I spotted the correct street name while driving around and quite naturally turned onto it... and got completely sidetracked. At least these days a decent GPS will make that less likely to happen.

On a different but related note, the neighborhood I grew up in had the house

This is VERY common in the Phoenix area. Camelback Drive goes from west of the city center through the Biltmore district (very nice) all the way into the Salt River Reservation (not so nice to us gringos, a nice place to live if you live there). It's interrupted for more than a half mile in some places. You have to pay attention to Google Maps.

Now, Siri will send you uphill sometimes when there is. no. hill. But that's entertainment.

Sometimes history gets in the way of sense. Around where I live there are at least three intermittent streets, and not too far away there's a street called "street of the fea" (in Spanish) because it jumps around so much. It goes jumping around for about 30 miles, but there's no one connected section that's very long. It must be over 100 years old with that name in that many different places, and it must have been quite jumpy even then. And I've no idea when it was originally created or why, but I'm gue

In Ottawa there is St. Laurent Blvd which if you keep going straight it turns into Russell Road. If you want to stay on St. Laurent you actually have to make a right turn at a light. Then there is Somerset which turns into Wellington which turns into Richmond which turns into Robertson but you can stay on Richmond if you turn left (though they call it Old Richmond Road).

It's just how all the old villages grew together. They didn't rename the roads they connected at the time because the

I think you're correct, which is why in my neck of the woods you can't just roll up to a house, say, "this looks like it", and start tearing it down. You need to get a permit.

The permit application requires a photo of the house you intend to take down. You have to prove you know what you're doing, e.g., that you've had the utilities, especially gas turned off. You have to have a pest control company eradicate any rats nesting in the structure that might move onto adjacent properties. You've got to notify the police and fire department well in advance and if they determine there is a public risk or nuisance you've got to pay for a police and/or fire detail. Then you've got to notify all the abutters by certified ail and post a demolition notice on the actual structure to be demolished seven days in advance.

Yeah, it's a lot of rigamarole, and I'm sure people in much of the rest of the country can't imagine living under that much regulation. On the other hand, we can't imagine having our house demolished by mistake. And somehow developers still manage to make a living, so I don't think it's too much to ask..

Yeah, I hated those types of addresses when I delivered for UPS (long before GPS). It always struck me how haphazard city planners could be.

Another fun one is the N/S or E/W street that is segmented into many non-contiguous streets. You would have to guess at where the number breaks were based on the perpendicular roads. If you missed it, you would have to drive back out and all the way around to find where the next segment of the same street picked up again... real PITA.

In San Antonio there are quite a few major streets that do this. In the northeast, just try tracing where Nacogdoches Road goes. A lot of these happen because of roads that had an intersection built where there used to be a curve, so now you have to make a turn at the intersection to stay on the same road.

If you read the article, it has a link to the demolition company's web site. The site still has contact information on it, along with the hideously juicy slogan, "We could wreck the world," which they did for these unfortunate folks.

It wasn't a Google Maps error, it was a "failure to identify the address error" by the crew. When you're doing something as destructive as tearing down a house, take a look at the street sign and make sure it matches the address on the work order. Don't blindly follow your GPS.

Don't count on the official town map. There's an industrial-area roadway near where I used to live that ran for a few miles with no connection to other streets - except for the one on the official city street map that didn't actually exist.

A couple years back the wife and I were driving in NV, from Topaz Lake to Hawthorne, over a very dirt-track-across-the-desert, scraped every couple years (but still an official state route), road.

As we approached Hawthorne, going through a pass in a range of hills, the nav system told us to turn left about a mile early and take a little road that went a couple car lengths and then off a cliff, maybe a couple hundred feet high.

Seems there had been an old road there, back in the pony-express days, which had gone away nn a landslide long ago. We're guessing the USGS still showed it, the map company had included it in their database, and the nav system had computed it could save us a couple tenths of a mile by taking the shortcut.

Fortunately we are aware of such pathologies, especially in remote areas, and were on the alert for it.

Shit like this is why you never, never NEVER trust your GPS and turn your head off.

The worst GPS has ever done me is send me down a county route in a truck too big for it.Next worst was directing me a mile out of my way east from a light, make an elaborate U-turn, then come back up to a place that was directly kitty-corner WEST of the light.

I take the time to find out where the hell I'm going before I ever leave. I get on Google Maps, find out where I'm going, then figure out the route myself. If the route is complicated enough (like 200 miles across west Texas, where the map looks like a graph from a CS textbook), I may even make a little skeleton map of various waypoints. I may also use the street view so that I know what a place looks like before I get there. I know the main routes around most of the big cities in the main DFW/Houston/San A

Yeah, back when I was doing DirecTV installs deep in rural Snohomish county Google maps would try to route me down fenced off high tension line inspection "roads." This was also the time back in 2006ish when there were a lot of new roads planned and on the map but never actually built because of the housing bust. I just went back to the paper map book from 2002.

Same physical street, with different street names for different sections. As an ex-taxi driver I can confirm that, regardless of the kind of map you are using, it is very easy to find the wrong address. There should have been a second, more reliable, identifier for the demolition, eg: a demolition notice pinned to the front door.

Given that it was a house with floors ripped out, parts of the ceiling and roof missing completely open to the sky I'm going to assume that anything that was still in the house probably had zero value as a result and it really was not a big deal. Providing the house gets rebuilt. The demo guys may have even done them a favour. Large scale repairs are often harder and take longer than groundup rebuilds.

But then everyone in this discussion seems to be making a lot of assumptions including TFA which claims a suit is likely because of what the CEO said instead of what the company has done.

Yes, because 'an eye for an eye' style revenge on an innocent mistake is the "right thing to do". Nobody will be going to court to fix this, the relevant insurance companies will work that out between themselves on a more civilised manner.

I think by law, that whenever this happens, the company 's owner should have their house destroyed - along with all of their personal photos, keepsakes and see if they think it is a big deal.

What if the company owner implements an official policy is to triple check all paperwork, house numbers, road signs, knock on the neighbors' doors to confirm they've got the right street. And the error is made because an employee is lazy and decides to skip some of these checks?

Yeah, I tried that shit back in the 70s. Mostly found a lot of psychos that didn't give shit about anything or suckers of those fuckers. Fuck, I'd take your average Scientologist over them. Unless they are a psycho Scientologist like Miscavige. Fuck Miscavige, that fucking mind fucking fuck of an asshole fucker.(Not to say ass fucking is bad per se, just that any ass fucking by Miscavige is rape.)

what next?using wikipedia to learn about economic and military condition of a country and its historical and cultural background, before invading? or to write academic papers that goes in to those decisions by people who used wikipedia to pass examinations?using twitter to allocate and channel emergency resources during emergency?etc etc

would be funny if these things are not already happening.

using a restricted (formal, as in twitter with its "trust & safety council" censorship, or informal as in langua

Currently, Google's self-driving car depends on creating a very detailed 3d map of the world. More detail here [ieee.org]. I don't like to link to Wired, but they got an exclusive interview [wired.com], and it confirms what I just wrote. So no, practically there isn't a difference.

So for a self-driving car to work, there are two choices: either figure out how to make better maps, or create a much smarter car than the one they have now. It has to work a lot better than the Google maps currently does.

So for a self-driving car to work, there are two choices: either figure out how to make better maps, or create a much smarter car than the one they have now.

Or, option 3, only self-drive in known areas. Yes, this will somewhat limit the vehicle's utility, but not very much, and it would know whether there's a potential problem as soon as you set the destination.

the car isn’t just seeing and figuring out the world as it drives along. It’s basing its actions on vast amounts of data the Google Self-Driving Car Project has already compiled about every road it travels. Before the car drives itself into new territory, the project team collects detailed information on permanent features: lane markers, the precise location of the curbs, the height of traffic lights, local speed limits, and so forth.

Yes, the technology took them to the wrong address but it didn't knock the house down. So a self driving car takes you to the wrong house. It's not that big of a deal. Those things will happen and there will be methods for the maps to be corrected. Emergency vehicles are still going to have a person driving, or at lease an over-ride system, so peoples lives won't be put at risk.

Yes, the technology took them to the wrong address but it didn't knock the house down. So a self driving car takes you to the wrong house.

You clearly haven't looked much at the technology for self-driving cars. The maps need to be so detailed, that if the map is wrong, it could drive off the street completely. Seriously go educate yourself before commenting again, you moron.

In his version that he observed, the locals who sit in the pub and drink all day got a contract. They went out to tear down a porch after having one more drink. They came back to his pub shaking and needing another drink talking about tearing down the wrong porch. All I can think is that his neighbor will be complaining about the guys who didn't tear down his and asking who his neighbor got to tear down his.

A company has done something dumb to you. Would you rather:1) complain to the press so everyone knows that the company makes mistakes2) refrain from talking to the press and then negotiate a large $ settlement with which to fix the actual problem

You are the CEO of a company that did something dumb, should you:1) comment to the press that this is not an extraordinary situation because you have a process in place to respond to this kind of request in due course, so that people will be impressed with how well

Not that strange. I had a one-day IT contract assignment at a building next to a freeway. Google Maps guided me to the general area but I couldn't find the building. None of the buildings had addresses that were visible from the street or painted on the curb. The addresses were clearly visible from the freeway. I had to drive into the parking lot each building to discover the address.

You think contractors demoing the wrong house is bad? There's been many cases where people have gone in for surgery and they've removed or operated on the wrong limb!! Crazy!

I work at a place that distributes medical supplies and one of the things we sell is 'skin markers', just small markers to write things like "THIS ARM" on patients before operations. It was such a problem that they actually had to come up with a solution for it to stop happening!

I had a friend who had a weird cancer under his thumbnail, and before getting his thumb amputated, he wrote "WRONG THUMB" on the one without the cancer. The nurse said that was a good idea. (His wife made him a strap-on curtain hook for his thumb. He said it made people uncomfortable when he wore it to work.)

I had eye surgery that I was conscious for, and the doctor, who'd been treating the condition and knew perfectly well which eye needed the surgery, made sure to confirm that the good eye had been

They committed a range of criminal offences least of which is trespass. They should be criminally charged being an incompetence idiot is no excuse to break the law. So break and enter and demolish, I'll bet anything you like they also stole a bunch of stuff. Might seem a little unfair but idiots who do stupid things should be taught the consequences of not stopping, checking and confirming. Computer made me do it, is not an excuse. Beside demanding criminal charges be filed makes the whole civil suit thing

Apple Maps has improved considerably since introduction. I find it quite usable now, at least where I go. You're probably talking about when they introduced it, apparently having decided that geographical information systems really couldn't be that hard.